Oh, well, yes, there are lots of folks who can only seem to poke holes and criticize the surface of things, but those aren’t the people who make LessWrong worthwhile, those people are the noise. Admittedly sometimes you have to slog through fifty nitpicks to find one earnest insight, but that’s sort of the human condition.
I’ve been analyzing my own behavior and I realized that knowing more about rationality and biases and so on is a double-edged sword. On the one hand, it allows me to evaluate ideas in a better way, but on the other (the human brain being what it is), being right about a lot of things leads to arrogance and a belief that one is always right. This is compounded by the use of the upvote/downvote system, which only makes this problem worse. It’s so easy to fall into the trap of arrogance when you have a large number of upvotes on your posts. It’s also easy to fall into the trap of thinking that one is immune to this sort of self-deception.
Sadly I’ve been seeing this type of behavior often here, and sometimes even from established members.
I can’t think of any solution except a total rehaul of the social dynamics of the site. There must be a better way of having more rational discussions than petty disagreements and blind anonymous upvotes/downvotes.
That’s a very good link, but I’m talking about the slightly different problem of arrogance—believing that you are right and other people are stupid, rather than simply trying to argue against them with rationalist ammunition. Although to some extent I think these two concepts overlap.
Oh, well, yes, there are lots of folks who can only seem to poke holes and criticize the surface of things, but those aren’t the people who make LessWrong worthwhile, those people are the noise. Admittedly sometimes you have to slog through fifty nitpicks to find one earnest insight, but that’s sort of the human condition.
I’ve been analyzing my own behavior and I realized that knowing more about rationality and biases and so on is a double-edged sword. On the one hand, it allows me to evaluate ideas in a better way, but on the other (the human brain being what it is), being right about a lot of things leads to arrogance and a belief that one is always right. This is compounded by the use of the upvote/downvote system, which only makes this problem worse. It’s so easy to fall into the trap of arrogance when you have a large number of upvotes on your posts. It’s also easy to fall into the trap of thinking that one is immune to this sort of self-deception.
Sadly I’ve been seeing this type of behavior often here, and sometimes even from established members.
I can’t think of any solution except a total rehaul of the social dynamics of the site. There must be a better way of having more rational discussions than petty disagreements and blind anonymous upvotes/downvotes.
http://lesswrong.com/lw/he/knowing_about_biases_can_hurt_people/
That’s a very good link, but I’m talking about the slightly different problem of arrogance—believing that you are right and other people are stupid, rather than simply trying to argue against them with rationalist ammunition. Although to some extent I think these two concepts overlap.